Category Archives: Business Development

Earlier this week, millions of Americans observed, open-mouthed, as the slow-motion trainwreck known as The Bachelor finale skidded across their televisions. Race car driver Arie Luyendyk chose Becca to be his wife. Then, after what appeared to be weeks of engaged bliss, he dragged the poor woman back into the spotlight to dump her like last week’s leftover fish, then proposed to runner-up Lauren B. Read more…

I’ve always been fascinated by genealogy and my family history. Back in high school, I researched my family tree as a senior project, which involved several trips to peruse musty old “books” at the public “library.” More recently, I used Ancestry.com’s online database to discover that my 11th-great-grandfather on my father’s side, William Bradford, took a rickety boat called the Mayflower to enter the country without papers or a visa to become Governor of Plymouth Colony.

You know how I love taking stories from outside the tax world – from places like politics and pop culture – and using them as examples to illustrate ways to market and manage your business. Today we’re going to turn to science – specifically, the concept of natural selection – to illustrate how to handle a threat to your very existence. Sounds fun, right? Let’s get to it! Read more…

Sometimes member success stories aren’t always obvious at first – even to the member who’s enjoying that success! Here’s a comment from yesterday’s Wednesday Marketing & Management Call-In, along with my comments and some final inspiration.

Here at TaxCoach, our experience over the last 13 years has confirmed our original vision that tax planning can transform practices. We’ve seen members come to us before they even have full-time practices, and make the jump from working for the man to full-time self-employment. We’ve seen one member take his practice from $50,000 in billings to over a million. (We’ve seen lots of members take their practices to over a million, actually.) We’ve seen members sell single plans for five and even six-figure fees.

Last week, we walked you through a step-by-step system for using the new tax law to generate tax-planning engagements from your existing client base. And we promised that this week, we’d do the same for new clients.

We first published this piece back in 2007. Since then, a lot has changed. (My daughter who was seven years old back then is now applying to colleges and my son who was two is now as tall as I am!) But some things remain eternal. Like the joy in a child’s face when he first sees that Santa visited his house. Or (wait for it) the value of target marketing. So join us for a walk down memory lane as we watch how one of “the great ones” does his stuff.

If you’ve got little kids, or maybe grandchildren, you see a lot of Disney movies. In 2013, it was Frozen, an animated retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale, “The Snow Queen.” One of that film’s highlights was Queen Elsa, voiced by pop star Idina Menzel, singing “Let it Go.”

Earlier this week, the Nobel Foundation announced that Professor Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business had won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics. Thaler made his bones through his study of behavioral economics, the search to understand how psychological, social, cognitive, and emotional factors affect financial decisions. His newest recognition is a timely reminder this tax-planning season that we can’t appeal to logic and reason alone to sell our services. The more you know about the science that earned Thaler his win, the more effective you’ll be in building your business. Read more…